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Arweave Q1 2021 Ecosystem Update: NFTs, The Guardian, a new web wallet, new gateway, & much more!

The Arweave Project
10 min readApr 12, 2021

This quarter has been astronomically busy for the whole Arweave ecosystem! In March alone, the network handled over 1 million transactions, and the storage endowment grew to over $550,000. The latest incubator programme, the Open Web Foundry, came to a close last week with over 500 participants. Plus, we have a raft of fantastic updates to share from the vibrant network of founders, including: Arweave’s unique offering for NFTs being showcased in the Guardian, the creation of atomic NFTs, ArConnect — a new MetaMask-style AR web wallet from the Verto team, and much, much more.

There’s been so much activity so far in 2021, we’re trialling a stripped-down version of this ecosystem update! Give us your feedback here.

Profit Sharing Community Updates

The Verto.Exchange team: Leading profit sharing token exchange

community.XYZ: The profit sharing communities hub

  • Over 70 profit sharing communities, and over 1000 atomic NFTs now call cXYZ home!
  • Radical improvements in loading speed and UX, including significantly reduced fees and increased usability and transparency.

ArDrive: Offering permanent, immutable file storage

ArVerify: The ‘blue tick for the permaweb’

  • Launch of the ArVerify tool, providing a ‘blue tick for the permaweb’
  • An explosion of activity post-launch of ArVerify, leading to over 5,500 verifications so far
  • Over $15k in profits distributed automatically to holders of ArVerify’s profit sharing token so far this year
  • Implementation of ArVerify with the ArConnect wallet from the Verto team

ArGo: Deploy to the permaweb in just one click

  • Over 250 dapps and communities have been deployed using ArGo, by more than 200 users
  • ArGo is awarded funds from Gitcoin Grants to support their work
  • Partnership with Polygon (previously Matic), integrating ArGo’s permanent hosting solutions
  • Custom domain support is now available for your ArGo-deployed apps & sites
  • Many new features, including nextJS deployment integration, and streamlined redeployment processes

fQR Weave: The permaweb’s immutable anti-counterfeiting solution

Evermore: A powerful permaweb-based file storage tool

  • Release of the Evermore app for MacOS, and a mobile-friendly web app, resulting in hundreds of new users
  • After becoming the first Arweave-based app to support minting & managing NFTs of all types (including music, images, & video), over 500 NFTs have been uploaded via Evermore to date.
  • Learn more about the Evermore PSC and token here

ArweaveNews: A community-run news service for the Arweave ecosystem

The Koi Protocol: A new framework for decentralized permaweb services

Pianity: Connecting artists, fans, and buyers by building permanent music NFTs

Decent.Land: A permaweb-based social network protocol

everFinance: A layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum with virtually gasless transactions using Arweave

  • The recent beta launch of everPay, which is ETH-compatible.
  • Read this piece for an analysis and comparison of zkSync, xDai, and how they measure up to everPay.

New on the Permaweb

Ecclesia: A social media platform focused on free speech

Arcade City: Decentralizing the gig economy

  • Arcade City, in operation for >5 years, recently migrated to the Arweave network, and is now a profit sharing community
  • Integration with Verto.Exchange — view their profit sharing token here

Litentry: Web3.0 cross-chain identity aggregation protocol

  • Integration with Arweave as Litentry’s data storage layer to ensure immutable, reliable data storage for all Litentry users
  • An AMA with the ArweaveNews team giving insights into what’s next for the project.

Non-Fungible Tokens & Arweave

The world is beginning to wake up to the incredible potential of Arweave + NFTs! Read more about why this is such a powerful combination in this Twitter thread and blog post from the core team. Arweave’s unique offering to the NFT economy is also outlined in this recent Guardian article.

If you have an NFT project you want to bring to Arweave, consider applying for the Arweave Grants programme, or reaching out to us via email.

Atomic NFTs

New this quarter to the Arweave ecosystem are atomic NFTs. That is, NFTs that have permanent, on-chain assets, no external metadata, and are contained within one Arweave address! Whether you’re using the arweave.net gateway to view the assets of an NFT, or telling a SmartWeave contract where to locate an NFT, with atomic NFTs on Arweave, the location for both tasks is the same. Read more about atomic NFTs here — the technology is a huge boon to NFT creators and collectors alike, ensuring that your assets will be accessible forever, and that they will not ever be dissociated from their metadata.

Hashmasks: A living NFT collection created in collaboration with >70 artists

  • This fantastic NFT digital art collection has officially migrated to using Arweave for permanent storage of its stunning images! This ensures that any Hashmasks owned will never be at risk of their associated art being lost.
  • All 16,384 Hashmasks are now stored on Arweave, forever — you can read about why and how here in this blog by the Hashmasks team.

1111 by Kevin Abosch: Arweave permanent storage in action

  • Digital artist Kevin Abosch recently released 1111, a collection of 1,111 digital artworks, via OpenSea.
  • Every artwork is also an NFT, and each NFT’s assets and metadata is stored on Arweave, ensuring they are permanently preserved, forever.
  • Additionally, every single artwork in this collection is also a profit sharing community! For example, here is the community page for piece 1111 #0537, and here is the image itself.
  • Each piece sold earns OpenKoi profit sharing tokens.

Other NFT projects recently migrating to or minted on Arweave include:

Arweave Network & Protocol Updates

Arweave 2.4.0.0, 2.4.0.1, & Succinct Proofs Of Random Access (SPoRA)

  • The SPoRA consensus mechanism upgrade for Arweave was released in February, plus another follow-up release.
  • SPoRA brings a raft of protocol improvements, including dramatically increased data replications across the network, and improvd mining efficiency.
  • Read the full SPoRA release blog post here, or check out this Twitter thread.

TestWeave

  • A new local testnet for Arweave has been released, with the core node development providing this docker
  • When setup, the testnet provides a full gateway and Arweave node on your local machine, also allowing you to query the testnet with GraphQL
  • TestWeave provides an SDK that you can install using NPM

SmartWeave

  • Release of a new, powerful modification patch to SmartWeave by John Letey, enabling embedding of smart contracts into any SmartWeave asset.
  • It’s now possible to turn web pages, images, videos, audio, or any other data on the new web into a profit sharing token or NFT, which can then be traded on Verto.Exchange.
  • The SmartWeave CLI UX has been entirely redesigned
  • SmartWeave now supports web extension-based wallets. Check out the repo here.
  • Fabian Riewe, of the ArVerify team, recently created a testing library for Smartweave.
  • Arweave Developer Advocate & communityXYZ Founder Cedrik Boudreau released two excellent how-to guides for building SmartWeave contracts, you can read them here and here.

Amplify: A faster, more powerful gateway implementation for Arweave

ArweaveJS

ArDB: Stop writing GraphQL requests by hand!

  • Arweave Developer Advocate & communityXYZ Founder Cedrik Boudreau has released ArDB, making it faster & easier to perform GraphQL queries. Check it out here.

uwu: A new safe language for writing SmartWeave contracts

  • The team behind Verto.Exchange created uwu in a community livestream
  • uwu allows for creation of a fully-functional NFT contract in ~40 lines of safer, JS-familiar code in only ~15 minutes!
  • Learn more in this presentation from @undefined_void, and in this article from ArweaveNews.

In the Wild

Podcasts

Arweave Founder Sam Williams has appeared on multiple podcasts this quarter, you can listen at the links here:

Articles

NFTs are helping artists solve a vital problem: who owns digital artwork? | The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/apr/03/non-fungible-tokens-digital-art-artists

Yes, Your NFTs Can Go Missing — Here’s What You Can Do About It | Decrypt - https://decrypt.co/62037/missing-or-stolen-nfts-how-to-protect

NFT Immutability Debate Grows as Tokenized Tweets Get Deleted and NFT Images Are Replaced | Bitcoin.com — https://news.bitcoin.com/nft-immutability-debate-grows-as-tokenized-tweets-get-deleted-and-nft-images-are-replaced/

It’s an NFT Boom. Do You Know Where Your Digital Art Lives? | How Arweave supports NFTs | CoinDesk — https://www.coindesk.com/its-an-nft-boom-do-you-know-where-your-digital-art-lives

Arweave vs Filecoin | How do the two protocols differ, and why? | From the ArDrive team — https://ardrive.io/arweave-vs-filecoin/

Arweave Introduces New Consensus “SPoRA” — https://tokenpost.com/Arweave-Introduces-New-Consensus-SPoRA-6729

Exploring Solana and the SOL Token — Ivan on Tech | The Arweave <> Solana SOLAR bridge — https://academy.ivanontech.com/blog/exploring-solana-and-the-sol-token

Web3 ELI5: What is Web3? | Arweave’s role for storage in Web3- https://messari.io/article/web3-eli5-what-is-web3

Advanced Blockchain AG Has Invested In Permanent Data Storage Provider, Arweave — https://blog.advancedblockchain.com/advanced-blockchain-ag-has-invested-in-permanent-data-storage-provider-arweave/

Version One Ventures invests in Arweave -

https://versionone.vc/announcing-our-investment-in-arweave/

https://www.chainnews.com/news/392522406744.htm

Ternoa Blockchain — Immortalizing Memories and Data | Ternoa utilises Arweave for immutable storage — https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/reviews/altcoin-projects/ternoa-blockchain-immortalizing-memories-and-data/

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What an amazing start to the year! Be sure to follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest news as it happens, and if you’re a developer, join us on Discord, where we have over 5,500 developers waiting to chat and collaborate with you. Also, if you’ve not yet joined the unofficial @Arweavers Telegram group for Arweave-related chat, join the conversation here.

See you on the permaweb!

-arweave-team

Blockchain
Cryptocurrency
Permaweb
Arweave
Decentralisation

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The Arweave Project

Written by The Arweave Project

3.2K Followers

A novel data storage blockchain protocol enabling a permanent serverless web and creating truly permanent data storage for the first time.

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